A web counter or hit counter is a computer software program that indicates the number of visitors, or hits, a particular webpage has received. Once set up, these counters are incremented every time the webpage is accessed by a user's web browser. Because the number of a counter is a proxy for popularity of the associated webpage (i.e. the higher the count the more visitors), webmasters tended to place web counters on their webpages to advertise this popularity, hoping that future users would also trust and frequently visit their websites.
However, web counters have fallen out of favor of webmasters (and users) in the last few years for several reasons. For example, web counters are not necessarily trustworthy. A webmaster could start the counter at a high number to give the impression that the corresponding webpage is more popular than it actually is, or increment the counter by an integer greater than one. Also, web counters are no longer associated with the impression of professional web design but rather are considered by some as a gimmicky feature. Furthermore, web counters are limited to the “visits” of end-users and do not take into account what other publishers of web content “think” about a particular webpage or website.
Thus, currently there is no efficient and trustworthy mechanism that indicates the trust that publishers of web content and/or end-users attribute to a particular webpage or website. Also, there is no efficient mechanism for a webmaster to determine how well the webmaster is doing in terms of marketing his/her content other than the sales of the webmaster's product or service and/or advertisement revenue.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.